Last week one of SA’s leading political analysts asked aloud in a note to his clients whether Cyril Ramaphosa had the desire to continue being president. It is a question worth asking.
Five years ago, when he took office, it is improbable that Ramaphosa imagined the job to be even half as hard as it became. He believed the crux of his leadership was the matter of who to appoint to key institutions. Choose a scrupulous lawyer to head the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) and Ramaphosa himself could sit back and watch while the justice system took care of corruption in the ANC. Choose a visionary to run Eskom, and electricity reform could continue apace. Choose a rigorous technocrat to run the SA Revenue Service (Sars), and the damage Tom Moyane did could be undone.
There was elegance in this imagined role. The president could orchestrate the country’s future from a dignified distance. He would not have to roll up his sleeves and fight. This vision didn’t work out for at least two reasons. One is that public institutions were considerably more damaged than Ramaphosa imagined. The second is more complex. It is about the politics of the ANC.
Ironically, Ramaphosa was entirely successful in defeating what he thought was his greatest enemy, the radical economic transformation (RET) faction of the ANC. He outwitted it and brought it to his knees. What he did not grasp is that the problem is considerably deeper than the RET faction. A large swathe of SA’s business and professional classes have come to rely on corrupt relations with state institutions, via the governing party, to accumulate wealth. They will keep corrupting it, with or without the RET gang.
Why this is so is a question for another column. The point here is that RET was a transitory expression of something far deeper and more permanent. Ramaphosa soon discovered this in the rudest way; he kept finding that powerful people, even among his closest allies, thought and acted much as the RET faction did.
And so the crux of his task as president was something he did not imagine. It was never simply about defeating an identifiable faction. It was instead a never-ending, combative campaign against a foe that keeps coming back. It requires a taste for interminable warfare that goes deeply against his grain.
When I try to think of Ramaphosa’s alter ego the person who keeps popping into my head is Wits University’s former vice-chancellor, Adam Habib. A couple of years after he took the job a section of the student body launched what was in effect a rebellion in the form of Fees Must Fall. The conflict appeared to enliven him. It fired him up, gave him fuel.
The more that was thrown at him, the harder he threw it back. When it was all over he still hadn’t had enough; he wrote a book about it all, celebrating what he had done. He is still at it now, running SOAS University in London with a ferocity that has had students and staff serially up in arms.
When I think of Ramaphosa I remember a private lunch at which he was present some two decades ago. He was subdued for a long while, until the conversation turned to large beasts, game rangers and poachers, and he suddenly came alive. It was clear that day that this was where his passion lay.
Ramaphosa has done SA a favour larger than it can ever know. He defeated Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma in the battle for the presidency, when every other potential candidate would most likely have lost. He saved SA from a true catastrophe.
But things have moved on. He no longer stands between SA and an abyss. On the contrary, the longer he remains in a job he fundamentally doesn’t want, the more he becomes a part of the problem. He can’t step away before the next general election. That would be horribly destabilising. But once he has seen the election through? He will have done all he can by then. His job will truly be over.
• Steinberg teaches part-time at Yale University.
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